Shelf Life

Category: Suspense

  • Kate Collins Latest Mystery Series

    Kate Collins Latest Mystery Series

                Kate Collins, best-selling author of the popular Flower Shop mysteries, is—excuse our pun–branching out with her Goddess of Greene St., a series of cozy mysteries centered around single mom Athena Spencer who after divorcing returns home to work in her family’s garden center.

    Kate Collins (Linda Tsoutsouris)

                It was a big change not only for Athena but also for her creator, Valparaiso resident Linda Tsoutsouris who has written 23 Flower Shop novels under the pen name of Kate Collins. Three of those books including “Mum’s the Word” were made into Hallmark Movies & Mysteries starring Brooke Shields in the role of Abby Knight, Tsoutsouris’s flower shop owning sleuth along with actors Brennan Elliott, Beau Bridges and Kate Drummond.

    Former attorney-turned-small-town-florist, Abby Knight, has a nose for sleuthing, quickly embroiled in a murder investigation, grateful for the help when she teams with retired private eye, Marco Salvare, who now owns a local bar and grill. Photo: Brennan Elliott, Brooke Shields Credit: Copyright 2015 Crown Media United States, LLC/Photographer: Christos Kalohoridis

                “It was hard to leave the flower shop, Abby, her boyfriend Marco and everyone—they were like family,” says Tsoutsouris whose two Goddess mysteries are “Statue of Limitations” and “A Big Fat Greek Murder,”

                “But now I’m feeling more comfortable and I really like Athena,” she says.

                As she did with her other series, Tsoutsouris has created a cast of quirky, fascinating characters including Athena’s mother, Hera who is, as one would expect of the matriarch of a large Greek family, a fantastic cook. There’s also Maia, the goddess of the field in Greek mythology, is a vegetarian in the series and Delphi, a take on the oracles of Delphi who foretold the future.

                “In my book, she’s always reading tea leaves,” says Tsoutsouris.

                The Flower Shop series takes place in the town of New Chapel, a stand-in for Valparaiso.

                “Goddess of Green St. is a mix of Saugatuck, the Lake Michigan town in southwest Michigan and Key West,” says Tsoutsouris who lives part time in Key West, Florida. “I like to give people a point of reference.”

    A Flower Shop Novella

                Before she became a writer, Tsoutsouris, who holds a master’s degree from Purdue University, worked as an elementary school teacher. After taking time off to care for her young son and daughter. Tsoutsouris became somewhat restless despite learning to macrame and so signed up for a correspondence course on how to write children’s books. She took it, wrote one, got it published and went on to write another 20. Her next shot at publication wasn’t quite so successful. Tsoutsouris wrote a romance novel she describes as horrible. The publisher agreed, rejecting her book. Always full of energy, Tsoutsouris immediately began attending as many conferences on the subject as possible and broke into that market as well.

                Now with five of her books having made it on to the New York Times Best-sellers’ list, Tsoutsouris is working on the Goddess of Greene St. series and keeps in touch with Abby and New Chapel by writing Flower Shop novellas such as the just released “A Frond in Need.”

                Asked where she gets her ideas as plots for so many mystery novels, Tsoutsouris that almost anything is a creative spark. 

                “If I see a garden pond,” she says, “I ask myself what if a body turns up in the pond?”

    For more information, visit katecollins.com

  • They Never Learn

    They Never Learn

                  Scarlet Clark, the lead character in Layne Fargo’s newest psychological thriller, They Never Learn, is not your typical English professor. While she takes her studies and students seriously, for 16 years she’s also been on a mission, to eliminate men at Gorman University she considers to be bad guys. By planning carefully and keeping the murder rate down to one a year, she’s managed to avoid discovery. That is until her last killing—the poisoning of a star football player accused of rape—doesn’t go so well.

    She’d posted a suicide note on the guy’s Instagram account, but it turns out you can’t kill a star athlete without some ramifications. Suddenly, the other suicide notes written by Scarlet are under review and her current project—dispatching a lewd department head who also (not all of Scarlet’s killings are devoid of self-interest) is her competitor for a fellowship she desperately wants.  

    Trying to forestall discovery, Scarlet insinuates herself with the police investigation while under pressure to get away with soon with this next kill.

      But it’s even more complex than this, after all it is a Fargo book and the Chicago author who wrote the well-received Temper, likes the complexities and power struggles inherent in relationships.

     In this case, adding to the drama is the transformation of Carly Schiller, a freshman who has escaped an abusive home life and now immerses herself in studies as a way of avoiding life. But when Allison, her self-assured roommate, is sexually assaulted at a party, Carly dreams of revenge.

    Fargo, Vice President of the Chicagoland chapter of Sisters in Crime, and the cocreator of the podcast Unlikeable Female Characters, has a little bad girl in her too.

    “I love the sinister title of They Never Learn,” she says, adding that this, her second thriller, has everything she loves in a book—sexy women, Shakespeare references and stabbing men who deserve it.

    She was enraged at what she saw as the injustice of the appointment of a man accused of rape into a high position.

     “I channeled that all-consuming anger into a story where men like that are stripped of their power, where they get exactly what they deserve,” she says.

    It’s a timely topic and Fargo is excited that PatMa Productions optioned the TV rights for her book, and she’ll be writing the pilot. 

    That’s a form of sweet revenge.

    Layne Fargo Virtual Book Events

    When: Thursday, October 22; 6 to 7:30 p.m. CT

    What: Layne Fargo in conversation with Allison Dickson, author of The Other Mrs. Miller, to celebrate the release of her new novel, They Never Learn.

    This event is hosted by Gramercy Books in Columbus, Ohio, and will be livestreamed on their Facebook page, with participants able to ask questions of both authors in the latter portion of the program.

    For more information and to stream: https://www.facebook.com/GramercyBooksBexley/events/?ref=page_internal

    When: Sunday, October 25, 1 p.m. EST

    What: Fiction: Witches and Other Bad Heroines by Boston Book Festival

    To register: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/bad-heroines/register

  • Virtual Book Event: Ask Me Anything with True Crime Authors

    Virtual Book Event: Ask Me Anything with True Crime Authors

    Log on to Reddit on Saturday August 22nd at 4:30 p.m. for “Ask Me Anything with True Crime Authors,” featuring four best selling authors who will be answering your questions live!

    Submit your question about writing, work, real-life crimes, cover-ups, covert operations, all-time favorite snacks, and anything in between and read through responses as the authors write them!

    Registrants will receive a direct link to the Ask Me Anything hosted on Reddit.com; in order to ask a question, please note you will need access to a free Reddit account.

    This text-only event will be hosted on a specific Reddit page. You can access this event by clicking the orange “GO TO ONLINE EVENT PAGE” button in your Eventbrite email confirmation or by following the direct link that will be shared via email about 10 minutes before scheduled start time.

    Visit BookYourSummerLive.com for more information!

    Maureen Callahan, author of American Predator, is an award-winning investigative journalist, author, columnist, and commentator. She has covered everything from pop culture to politics. Her writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, New York, Spin, and the New York Post, where she is currently critic-at-large. She lives in New York.

    Amaryllis Fox, author of Life Undercover, had a CIA career in the field and now covers current events and offered analysis for CNN, National Geographic, Al Jazeera, the BBC, and other global news outlets. She speaks at events and universities around the world on the topic of peacemaking. She is the co-host of History Channel’s series American Ripper and lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter.

    Dr. Lee Mellor Ph.D. is a criminologist, lecturer, musician, and the author of seven books on crime including Behind the Horror. He received his doctorate from Montreal’s Concordia University after specializing in abnormal homicide and sex crimes. As the chair of the American Investigative Society of Cold Cases’ academic committee, he has consulted with police on cold cases in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Ohio, and London, Ontario. He resides in Ontario, Canada.

    Ariel Sabar, is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The Washington Post, and many other publications. He is the author of My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He also authored Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.

  • How Quickly She Disappears

    How Quickly She Disappears

                Intrigued by the tales his grandparents told of living in Tanacross, a small Alaskan village back in the late 1930s, Indiana author Raymond Fleischmann has woven a mystery set in that time frame and location.

                “I grew up hearing their stories about Alaska, the cold, the isolation, the long days and the long nights,” says Fleischmann, the author of the just released How Quickly She Disappears.  “So, the setting is very real though my characters are fictional and not based on my grandparents at all who were very much in love and married for over 60 years.”

                That part is probably good as Fleischmann’s novel is about Elisabeth Pfautz who is living in Alaska with her husband and young daughter. The marriage is joyless, but her daughter is her delight and, more forebodingly, a reminder and connection with her twin sister, Jacqueline, who when she was eleven, disappeared. No one has seen or knows what happened to her since then.

                  Haunted by her lost sister, experiencing reoccurring dreams of 1921 and the circumstances of the disappearance and saddened by the state of her marriage, Elisabeth is drawn to Alfred, a substitute mail pilot who lands in Tanacross. Elisabeth, who grew up a small German community in Pennsylvania, feels a kinship of sorts with Alfred, who is also of German heritage. But then things turn distinctly weird and terrifying. Albert murders another man, apparently in cold blood. But he also knows, he tells Elisabeth, what happened to her sister, something he will reveal to her at a cost.

                Fleischmann says he’s always been drawn to novels that are propelled by relatively simple, often violent acts, but do so in a way that’s careful, human, and deeply examined. From Alaska in 1941, Fleischmann takes us back to 1921 where we meet Jacqueline as well.

                “I thought it was important for people to know about her as well,” says Fleischmann, who earned an MFA from Ohio State University, “To me, at the time of her disappearance, Jacqueline is a lonely and somewhat stunted child who is having difficulty navigating the transition from adolescent to adult, just like many of us. So is Elisabeth and Jacqueline’s disappearance has left a big void in her life. As an adult she still feels very much alone without her sister and appears to suffer in many dysfunctional ways.”

                All this makes her vulnerable to Alfred’s cat and mouse game as does the voice she seems to hear, that of Jacqueline urging her to “come and find me.”

  • The Border: A Novel (Power of the Dog)

    The Border: A Novel (Power of the Dog)

              “I’ve long and often said that the ‘Mexican Drug Problem’ is really the American drug problem,” says Don Winslow who recently completed The Border, the third book in his Cartel Trilogy.

              While Winslow is writing fiction, his New York Times bestselling books are all too real.

              “We’re the consumers and the ones funding the cartels and fueling this violence because of our demand for drugs,” says Winslow. “And then we have the nerve to point to Mexico and talk about Mexico corruption. What about our corruption?  If there’s anyone who should be building a wall, it’s Mexico to protect themselves from our demand.”

              Winslow’s fast action paced books, written in a style he describes as “close third person,” are good reads on several levels, including the enjoyment of a well-researched thriller about Drug Enforcement Agency undercover operative Art Keller and his long struggle in a harrowing world amidst Mexican cartel power struggles, traffickers, drug mules, teenage hitmen, families seeking asylum to escape the drug wars, narcos, cops and political corruption on both sides of the border as well as attorneys and journalists.

              The other level is the indictment of what he views as a failed policy by the U.S. to stem the tide of drugs.

    “We’ve had a War on Drugs for almost 50 years and last year more people died of drug overdoses than ever before,” says Winslow. “We’ve already had this lab experiment and it was called Prohibition. As long as you have people wanting drugs, you’ll have people selling drugs. The way to end the violence and crime that goes along with drug use is to legalize drugs and treat them as the social health problem they are.”

    Whether you agree with Winslow, whose books have been acquired by FX Networks for television, his writing is compelling as he takes us into a world he has inhabited since his first book, The Power of the Dog, was published. He intended to end the series with The Cartel, his second book about Keller, which he sold to Fox for a seven-figure amount.

    “I swore that was my last book—I was done,” he says. “But the difficulty was that the story wasn’t. The violence in Mexico is increasing, the heroin epidemic in the U.S. is killing more people and the immigration issue—there was more to discuss. Like in my first two books, I had more to say through the medium of crime fiction.”

    Winslow says the escalating violence in Mexico is amazing. In 1998, the big news was the murder of 19 people in a Mexican village that was drug related.

    “By the time I was working on The Cartel, that kind of incident wouldn’t even be in the papers, it’s such a low body count,” says Winslow, noting that the difficulties in writing his earlier books was finding people involved in the drug trade who were willing to talk. “By the time I got done writing The Cartel, people who had been hiding their crimes were celebrating them.”

    But Winslow says he’s seeing a definite groundswell of change.

    “Cities are doing some really interesting and forward thinking about it,” he says. “We have a 2.2 million prison population behind bars and 20% of that is drugs; we have 181,000 in Federal prison and around 90,000 of those are drug related. We are the market for drugs. We’re 5% of the world’s population and we use 80% of the opioids. We need to be doing something different.”

    Though he says he’s done with the Cartel Trilogy, Winslow acknowledges it was weird when he sent off his final manuscript.

    “That was 20 years of my life, a total of one-third of my life,” he says.

    Visit Don Winslow.com

  • Marcus Sakey “Afterlife”

    Marcus Sakey “Afterlife”

    In his dream, Marcus Sakey found himself walking the streets of Chicago, everything is much the same but also different—in the way that dreams often are.marcus

    “At first, I think that everyone is gone but then realize it’s me that’s gone–not anyone else– and that I was dead,” says Sakey, who seconds after this realization woke up in his own bed, next to his wife. But the import of the dream remained.

    “In the dream, I wasn’t scared but when I woke up, it seemed like a nightmare when I imagined being in those same circumstances of wandering around, being dead and not being able to speak to her,” says Sakey, whose bestselling Brilliance, the first in a trilogy, has sold over a million copies.

    This dream became what Sakey calls a “seed crystal,” the catalyst to write Afterlife (Thomas & Mercer 2017; $24.95) a supernatural thriller featuring Brody and Claire McCoy, FBI colleagues and lovers. Killed in the line of duty, both are reunited in an after world where they must battle an ancient satanic entity.

    It was a story Sakey felt compelled to write but one that was frightening as well.

    “This one scared me from the very beginning and it scared me every time I sat at the keyboard,” he says. “I never looked up and saw ghosts. Like any of my books, when I’m writing I’m working on it all the time not just when I’m at the keyboard. When I’m having dinner with my wife or playing with my daughter on the swing, I’m thinking about the characters and what they are doing. I was also afraid I might not be able to pull it off.”

    Fascinated by mythology since he was very young and striving to bring an almost mythical quality to his book, Sakey rewrote the first 100 pages nine times, each revision adding new layers, clarifications and bringing the characters into sharper focus.

    “It was my ninth book and by far the hardest I’ve written,” he says.

    But the rewards of all that hard work have been great. Imagine Entertainment, an American film and television production company founded by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, won an auction for the screen rights to Afterlife.  Grazer and Howard are producing the movie with Sakey writing the screenplay.

    “To be perfectly honest, none of this has sunk in,” says Sakey when asked how he feels about all this heady success. “My job up until now has been to hang out with my daughter in the morning and then go into the basement and make stuff up.”

  • The Death of Mrs. Westaway: A New Psychological Thriller by Ruth Ware

    The Death of Mrs. Westaway: A New Psychological Thriller by Ruth Ware

    Tarot cards, a threatening stranger and a mysterious will propel Hal, a young vulnerable orphan to spend her remaining cash for a railway ticket to the funeral of a woman who solicitors believe is her grandmother. Hal, who makes her precarious living reading Tarot cards, a skill she learned from her mother who was killed in a hit-and-run a few years earlier, thinks she knows better. But still, when she receives a letter indicating she is an heir to the moneyed estate, she decides to see if the same skills she uses to tell fortunes can help obtain part of her “inheritance.”

    Atmospheric and compelling, The Death of Mrs. Westaway (Gallery/Scout Press $26.99; 2018), is the fourth novel of English author Ruth Ware, author of the best- selling The Woman in Cabin 10 and The Lying Game.

    Ware, who is on a book tour throughout the  United States, took time out to answer the following questions.Author Photo - Ruth Ware c Gemma Day

    What inspired you to write The Death of Mrs. Westaway?

    I can’t put my finger on one single inspiration, but probably the key thing that defines the book for me is Hal. Having written three books about women who stumble into events more or less through no fault of their own, I wanted to write a very different kind of main character this time round – one who brings the events of the novel down upon themselves. Hal sets out to commit a crime – and in doing so sets of a nightmarish set of dominoes. That was a very conscious choice on my part!

    Were you familiar with Tarot cards before you wrote this book or did you have to learn about them? And why did you decide to make them part of the story? In that vein, have you always had an interest in fortune telling?

    I’m super skeptical and don’t really believe in any kind of supernatural forces so I had never had my cards read, though of course I was familiar with some of the images on tarot cards and found them very beautiful and inspiring as visual images. I had to research the meanings from scratch as I knew nothing about fortune telling, or the different kinds of tarot spreads. I really enjoyed the research though and found myself quite swept up in the different meanings. I suppose I made them part of the story because I wanted Hal to be someone who was practiced in reading people and telling them what they wanted to hear. So I tried to give her a job that fitted with that and was in some way a preparation. Making her a cynical tarot reader – one who doesn’t believe in the power of the cards but uses her skills to deceive – seemed fitting.

    Your books create such a sense of foreboding–do you ever get caught up in that and experience those feelings?

    Of course! Writing is like reading – you get just as caught up in the atmosphere you’re creating. But I find it’s quite hard to scare myself when I’m writing, because I know when the jump scares are going to come. I get immersed in the atmosphere, but the sense of terror I get sometimes reading other writers’ work just isn’t there, because I’m in control.

    Do you plot your novels and your characters or do they evolve?

    A mix of the two – I usually have a skeleton structure in my head, and I think about the characters for a long time before I start writing, so they are usually quite evolved by the time I put pen to paper. But I write very little down – they exist mainly in my head so they tend to be quite fluid and evolve as things develop on the page.

    What writers have influenced you?

    For this book, particularly Daphne du Maurier. I love her work.

    What’s next for you? 

    Another book of course! I’m writing it now, but it’s too early to tell you what it’s about…

    Ifyougo:

    What: Ruth Ware

    When: Monday, June 4th at 7 p.m.

    Where: Anderson’s Bookshop, 26 S La Grange Rd., La Grange, IL

    FYI: This event is free and open to the public. To join the signing line, please purchase the author’s latest book, The Death of Mrs. Westaway, from Anderson’s Bookshop. To purchase please stop into or call Anderson’s Bookshop La Grange (708) 582-6353.

     

     

     

  • Michael Koryta in Chicago to Talk About His New Book

    Michael Koryta in Chicago to Talk About His New Book

    Michael Koryta, the New York Times-bestselling author of 12 suspense novels of including Those Who Wish Me Dead and Rise the Dark talks with writer Jane Simon Ammeson about his just released “How It Happened” (Little Brown 2018; $27).Michael Koryta

    “How It Happened” starts off with the so chilling confession and then suddenly we’re wondering okay, was it true? Is your book based on one specific case or did statistics from Project Innocence help shape the story for you or what shaped the story in your mind?

    The confession in the book was inspired by a false confession that was given during the investigation of the disappearance and murder of Jill Behrman, who was a 19-year-old Indiana University freshman when she vanished on a bike ride on a beautiful spring morning in a small college town. Her bike was found near my childhood home, and I was 17 when that happened, and then I was 19 when I began to write some police beat articles about the case for the local newspaper. There was a search going on at that time based on a confession. Those memories are profound and tragic to me.

    “How It Happened” is complex just like all your novels, do you plot everything in advance or does it more just flow? 

    I don’t know how to outline, but I do know how to rewrite! I do many, many drafts.

    And do you ever find yourself caught up in the feel of it all so that you’re where your characters are and experiencing what they’re experiencing rather than sitting at a desk writing about it? And do your characters take on a life of their own or are you in control of them?

    If you don’t feel caught up in it, then it won’t be any good. If the desk doesn’t vanish, and if you don’t disappear into the story to join your characters, then how will the reader be able to have that experience? I don’t want to have any control over my characters so much as I want them to explain the story to me, and for them to surprise me. That’s the joy of it.

    You’re books are so atmospheric, your characters haunted in many ways and there’s often a combination of the natural—caves, mountains, rivers, now Maine and the ghostly or the unknown. I’m familiar with Bloomington as that’s where I went to Indiana University and I love French Lick/West Baden, those marvelously restored early 20th century resorts in Southern Indiana. All this makes me  curious about how you look at these places and what makes them so haunting as if they’re characters themselves? And how/why did you choose Maine for this book?

    I respond to places that have a combination of visual and emotional impact. Sometimes, that might be in an eerie or creepy way — the surreal experience of walking into another time in the West Baden Springs Hotel, or riding a boat on an underground river. In other cases, it is found in the collision of beauty and danger. This would be the Maine coast to me. I love a place that can be astonishingly beautiful in one moment, and turn threatening in the next. It allows me to bring the setting to life like a character.

    Did you ever find  a book written by your female relative who was a published author back in the 1800s? What was her name?

    I still haven’t been able to track one down, sadly. Jane Parker was her name. She wrote novels in the late 1800s, and was apparently well-regarded in her era, which is even more special because she was a woman writing in an age when not many women had the chance, let alone earned that critical respect. I am afraid none of her books have survived, but I will remain on the hunt!   

    Will we ever get another novel set in French Lick and West Baden like “So Cold the River?

    I think you will! I finally got the film rights back on SO COLD THE RIVER after it went stagnant with the studio that optioned it originally, and I am exploring ways to get that done with an independent filmmaker, and as I work on that, I keep thinking of new ideas in that area, and with those characters. I am very drawn to that area, and to the stories that abound there. I am feeling the call down there again, louder and louder.

    Ifyougo:

    What: Michael Koryta book signing

    When: Tuesday, May 22 at 7 p.m.

    Where: Anderson’s Bookshop Naperville, 123 W Jefferson Ave., Naperville, IL

    Cost: This event is free and open to the public.

    FYI: To join the signing line, please purchase the author’s latest book, How It Happened, from Anderson’s Bookshop. To purchase please stop into or call Anderson’s Bookshop Naperville (630) 355-2665 or order online at andersonsbookshop.com/event/michael-koryta-0

     

     

  • Are You Sleeping by Kathleen Barber

    Kathleen Barber’s thriller Are You Sleeping? (Gallery Books 2017; $26) tells the story of  Josie Buhrman who thought she had put the trauma of her early life behind her, when a hit investigative podcast about her father’s murder brings the past back, compelling her return to the small Illinois town of Elm Park where she grew up.

    “The main storyline of Are You Sleeping was inspired by true crime podcasts like ‘Serial,’ says Barber, a graduate from the University of Illinois and Northwestern University School of Law who previously practiced bankruptcy law at large firms in Chicago and New York

    .  “I was utterly captivated with the first season of ‘Serial’ when I listened to it in the fall of 2014– so much so that I spent a lot of time reading about the podcast online and visiting forums where the underlying case was discussed. At one point, I caught myself doing an online image search for some of the people involved in the case, and I realized that I had perhaps crossed a line from interested to inappropriately obsessed. It was then that I started thinking about how the popularity of the podcast must feel to the people on the other side of the case–the people who I was image-searching for, the people who were interviewed for the podcast, and, most of all, the family of the victim. That was what I was thinking about when I started writing Are You Sleeping–what it’s like to be on the other side of a case that’s moved into the realm of pop culture.”

    Barber, who was born and raised in Galesburg, Illinois, says that she wants to tell stories about women from the Midwest and used her hometown as the setting for her book.

    “When I was writing Are You Sleeping, I could envision the characters walking down certain real-life streets in Galesburg and drinking in existing bars,” says Barber. “Since so much of the rest of the book is created from whole cloth, setting the book in a familiar location really helped me ground the story in reality.”

    If you go:

    What: Talk and book signing

    When: Thursday, August 10 at 6:30 p.m.

    Where: City Lit Books, 2523 N. Kedzie Blvd., Chicago, IL

    Cost: Free

    FYI: (773) 235-2523; citylitbooks.com

  • Hauntings of the Underground Railroad: Ghosts of the Midwest

    Before the Civil War, a network of secret routes and safe houses crisscrossed the Midwest to help African Americans travel north to escape slavery. Although many slaves were able to escape to the safety of Canada, others met untimely deaths on the treacherous journey—and some of these unfortunates still linger, unable to rest in peace.

    The author in front of an Underground Railroad stop said to be haunted.

    In Hauntings of the Underground Railroad: Ghosts of the Midwest, Jane Simon Ammeson investigates unforgettable and chilling tales of these restless ghosts that still walk the night. This unique collection includes true and gruesome stories, like the story of a lost toddler who wanders the woods near the Story Inn, eternally searching for the mother torn from him by slave hunters, or the tale of the Hannah House, where an overturned oil lamp sparked a fire that trapped slaves hiding in the basement and burned them alive. Brave visitors who visit the house, which is now a bed and breakfast, claim they can still hear voices moaning and crying from the basement.

    Ammeson also includes incredible true stories of daring escapes and close calls on the Underground Railroad. A fascinating and spine-tingling glimpse into our past, Hauntings of the Underground Railroad will keep you up all night.